Friday, January 3, 2014

Man Descended From Apes? Please.

A display at Yale University circa 1935, purporting to show how humans descended from apes. A new Pew poll suggests that 33% of Americans...

They've been pushing this nutty idea for the past 150 years or so, that once upon a time, there were no human beings on Earth. There were apes, though, and gradually, over a long, long time, these apes somehow morphed into people.

And when I say "a long, long time," I mean like millions of years. It's a neat idea, for a science fiction story. Kind of like the one about how the whole universe used to be the size of a tiny dot, then exploded outward for no reason at all and became the vast, gigantic universe.

The truth, which we hold as self-evident, is that God made humans in His image. This took place about 3,000 years ago. It was six days into a week of frenzied activity in which God made the heavens and the Earth, light and dark, the water and the sky, and all the beasts that creep and crawl and fly and swim.

Then He made humans, which for some reason didn't go as well as some of the other things He made, and then He took the seventh day off to drink beer and watch football. Some theories suggest that He made humans while drinking beer and watching football, and was somewhat distracted by that, which is why the humans were a bit of a botch job.

Some theories suggest that humans are actually a perfect replica of God, and God Himself is nothing to write home about.

In any case, that's what happened, not this ape thing, which only a scientist, or multi-culturalist, or Frenchman in man panties, or liberal college professor could really believe. A new Pew poll suggests that Americans are finally starting to push back against the ape idea, which as I mentioned, has been crammed down our collective throats for way too long.

According to the poll, 33% of Americans believe that humans have been this way since the beginning of time. Even better, more than half of all Republicans, who are generally ahead on things, now reject the ape-man idea. And among Evangelical Christians, who are always way out in front, nearly two-thirds reject the ape-man.

As good as these developments are, it's kind of a lonely place to be. By far, most people in the so-called advanced countries still swallow the whole "descended from apes" hokum. The chart below, while a few years out of date, shows that of 34 countries, only people in Turkey rejected the ape-man idea more than Americans.

Adults were asked to respond to the statement: "Human beings, as we know
them, developed from earlier species of animals." The percentage of
respondents who believed this to be true is marked in blue; those who
believed it to be false, in red; and those who were not sure, in yellow.

You'll note that several countries were not represented in these findings. This is merely because polling was not successfully completed. For example, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the poll takers were stoned to death by angry mobs. In India, the poll takers were women, so they were set upon by village elders, repeatedly raped, disemboweled with a rusty piece of scrap metal, then set on fire.

Poll organizers believe that the forward-thinking people in these three countries probably reject the ape-man theory at even higher rates than Americans.